It's irrelevant if their objective is to punish women or if they are the most honorable among us — Hanover

It certainly isn't irrelevant to the women whose lives are continually ruined by these laws. But sure, treat it as a cute little academic debate while taking the word of fundamentalist misogynists for granted.

whether there were legitimate grounds to regulate abortion. — Hanover

There is no debate about regulating abortion, and especially not in the US, a fundamentalist regime of extremism and misogyny. Abortion is irrelevant to these people. The only relevant debate is how much these people want to punish women for being independent and pleasure-seeking. Again, the onus is on anyone who wants to take these people at their word. They care about children? Prove it. Because every action of theirs has one effective result only: to punish women. Prove otherwise.

I mean fuck me, we're talking about Texas which is sending their children into gas chamber classrooms. These people are supposed to care about children? Nope, just immiserating women.

Not my fault that you take these Mullahs of American Christianity seriously.

That's not what the people say who oppose abortion, so you've psychoanalyzed them all, including the women who hold that position and determined them all liars? — Hanover

No, because only morons take these people at their word when you can simply look at what they do. The faux 'how could you!' tone of your post is hilarious. It's like asking Nazis if they want to exterminate Jews and then being shocked that someone isn't taking them at their word when they say no. The only idiot is the person who is shocked. You don't need psychoanalysis. Just eyes. These people hate women, and pleasure'd-up, independent women most of all.

The onus is really on those who want to take them seriously. Demonstrate what support and measures they take to support children and women. Good luck finding anything other than punitive measures. The 'they care about children' sthick is simply a lie, believed only by the most stupid.

Did anyone demand that the Taliban be psychoanalyzed when they said they'd turned over a new leaf? No. Why? Because you'd have to be a fucking dipshit to believe them. As is anyone who think American ISIS care about children.

The other being that I take the pro-life folks at their word that their concern is over fetal rights and not a desire to subjugate women. — Hanover

Nah, this kinda stuff has nothing to do with the life of children. It's just punishment for women who have sex. That's it. It's pretty straightforward misogyny. Anyone who thinks these people have any concern for children has not looked paid any attention to how they treat children. Except "I fucking hate women and hope they are miserable forever if they enjoy themselves even slightly" is a harder sell than "I like unborn children".

This isn't correct on a couple of levels, the first being that life for a woman in Afghanistan bears little resemblance for life as a woman in the US, with likely 0% of the US women wishing Taliban policies would be instituted in the US upon them. — Hanover

Also of course this is entirely untrue. Or at least, you just need to substitute one woman hating religion for another. Everything else is cosmetic.

No wonder the US gifted Afghanistan to the Taliban. They share the same hateful, fucked up, attitudes towards woman.

Also maybe Americans will come to realize the supreme court as an institution is a vile, anti-democratic house of shit, no matter who sits on it, but more probably liberals will take the line that no actually it's just one or two (5?) bad apples nominated by Republicans. As if the entire institution isn't a fucking sham that occasionally dangles some cultural compromise like meth to keep the economic serfs at bay.

The problem is the -archy part of both.

We live with technology, and its basis in science and mathematics -- and don't have to understand it. Likewise we live with the decisions of those in power, both in government and in business; the basis for those decisions come from political and economic paradigms -- whether we understand them or not. The idea of the efficiency of free markets is as much taken for granted as Euclid's postulates in many minds. — Xtrix

Right, but only one of these is differential in its effects. Whatever the discourse around parallel lines, my life is exactly the same as Jeff Bezos. It is not the same when it comes to political and economic structure. These cannot be analogized, not by any sensible stretch of the imagination. Again, power and positionality. Who is speaking? To what end?

freedom of the market, privatization, entrepreneurialism of the self, individual liberty, and all the rest of it, should be the ruling ideas of a new social order. — Xtrix

Does it not twig that 'the marketplace of ideas' is exactly of a piece with this? And another point - I always think it's terrible when people discuss neoliberialism as a regime of ideas and not actions. The ideas are retroactive. Had Friedman's ideas not provided the ideological cover for what would have, in all probability, be done with or without them, they would have used another set of ideas. The idealist approach to understanding neoliberalism is totally misguided. Instead, one ought to begin with privatization; devolution of power; the demolishing of workers rights; inequitable trade agreements. The 'ideas' are so much window dressing added on top. While they feed back and crystalize what is already happening, to begin with neoliberalism as a doctrine of 'ideas' rather than material effects is completely wrongheaded. This is yet another reason why I do not believe in civility politics.

And just to be clear, I'm all for bad faith arguments, tactically employed. I want to win in reality, not 'be the most rational' in discussion. The enemy ought to be exasperated. They ought to have to waste hundred and thousands of hours and money and resources. The powerful have this down to a tee. The left - or more precisely, American liberals - need to learn to argue smart (as them), not argue well. Liberals like to self-aggrandize and scoff about how 'the facts have a liberal bias' - it doesn't occur to them the game is played exactly where the facts are irrelevant, and that they are the biggest dupes in the building.

Well we are becoming more and more Americanized every day, which is the worst possible thing that can happen. In some respects we are much worse, considering we just passed the most authoritarian and utterly terrifying cyber-security law on the face of the planet. In any case, I most certainly want more division in Australia. So long as the lines between us and them are not properly drawn, we - in Australia as in the US - will continue to lose.

The division and discord we see here, with the Trump presidency the most recent example, has been building for decades. — T Clark

The division and discord you have in the US is between one set of working class plebs pitched against another set of working class plebs. What you don't have is a righteous division between those with power and those without. The fact that you under the absurd impression that this works along party lines - blaming 'Republicans', as though democrats are note complicit and in fact part of the same machine - makes you exactly one of the said working class plebs.

It would be absurd to discuss a problem of geometry if your interlocutor has beforehand rejected Euclid's axioms, or problems of algebra if arithmetic has been rejected. The same can be said of political or economic problems as well, and indeed for nearly any intellectual conversation worth having. — Xtrix

The same cannot, in any sense, be said of political and economic problems. Why? Because the latter issues are lived. You may never have to deal with Euclid's axioms, but economics and politics will deal with you whether you like it or not.The liberal idea that we're all in this together tra-la-la happy-happy hold-hands simply does not hold. When some corporation is poisoning your water supply for profit, the idea that one must hold equal in discourse what is unequal in reality is to side with said poisoners. There are issues in which if you are not engaged and partisan, you do not deserve to comment. When you erase considerations of power and positionality and treat discussion as some abstract game disconnected from real life, you cede power to those who, in that 'real life', make moves that matter, while defanging and making tea-time out of discourse among fake equals who are anything but.

If you cannot exercise power in discourse when massive power in reality is being everywhere exercised by those who would be more than happy to watch you rot, then you may as well lay down and die. There are lived asymmetries that cannot be papered over by fake, idealized symmetries without exacerbating the former. Division and incivility is a public good. Perhaps the last remaining one, in a world in which all actual power has accrued to but a handful. Sometimes, you don't want to 'understand' and 'communicate' with the river poisoners. You want them to stop poisoning your river.

It's very cute to see Americans lobbing tar bombs at their respective local villains, as if a multi-decade bipartisan effort led by a nation whose condition of existence is perpetual war isn't the problem.

A drone strike, intended to kill members of the Islamic State - Khorasan Province, also lead to the deaths of ten Afghan civilians. Among those ten were six children. The ten civilians were killed when the drone strike blew up a car right outside their house. The youngest victim was two years old. Her name was Sumaya.

Ramin Yousufi, a relative to those slain, let out his heart to a BBC reporter: "Why have they killed our family? Our children? They are so burned out we cannot identify their bodies, their faces." The most grotesque part is that the family was planning to evacuate to America through Kabul Airport. One of those murdered had worked as a translator for US forces in Afghanistan. Another had already secured visas for their departure. An American Dream dashed across the sands of Afghanistan

https://themountain.news/news/american-drone-strike-murders-ten-afghan-civilians-six-children

Americans braying about 'women and children' need to shut the fuck up forever.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/shocking-and-disturbing-explosive-report-claims-corruption-and-branch-bombing-has-left-the-wa-liberals-a-political-wasteland-20210827-p58mlk.html

"Unethical, underhanded and corrupt practices have left the Western Australian Liberal Party a penniless ‘political wasteland’ on the verge of ‘extinction’ with disaffected members considering starting a new conservative party, according to a report released on Saturday by the WA Liberal Party.

These are just some findings of the explosive review released at the party’s state council meeting which looks into its inner workings in the lead up to the WA Liberal’s humiliating 2021 election loss."

Just the WA libs?

Approved and posted.

When you learn that capital is indifferent to fake lines on a map except to the extent that it can use them to its advantage, it doesn't really matter who does the manufacturing.

Considering the US had 20 years to get their logistics straight, these were not captured. They were gifted.

Jesus Christ the instinctive rhetoric people use to talk about Afghanistan is so fucking poisoned by colonialist bullshit.

And of course, if the choppers were so unimportant that they could just be dumped in the hands of terrorists, this tells you that their only function were as units for wealth transfer to arms manufacturers. What actually happens to them is completely irrelevant because the money has already changed hands, and that was the only purpose of the Afghan business venture.

Hence, applying the philosophical issues of individuation to a... geographic area? — Banno

I spent most of my reading budget this year reading about state-formation and the contingency and fragility of the state-form so yes, very much so, and this is pretty uncontroversial except to those for whom history began in 1648. Most anti-colonial struggle is a struggle over geographic individuation among other things. Even your own comment - "Afghanistan is ungovernable" is of a piece with imperialist rhetoric. No, Afghanistan is perfectly governable, it's just not governable by a centralized state-system which would like to impose governance from above (at least, not governable very well by such a system).

Also, all individuation is political, which is the first thing anyone talking about individuation should know. Which rules out all of analytic philosophy quite nicely.

In the introduction there's discussion of the notion that Afghanistan isn't a country so much as a gap between countries — Banno

:meh: Seems kinda like an imperialist take to me, where 'country' = 'centralized system which can be taken over easily by an invading power'. Don't like it at all as you've described it. That Afghanistan isn't an colonial-invasion-friendly country doesn't make it 'not a country' and just 'an empty space between countries'.

There's an argument to be made that the very idea of a 'country' is the kind of thing imposed on nations and communities all the better for empires to bat around at will, but that doesn't sound like what's at stake here.

But I'll listen to it if I have time.

The security system is trembling due to... — javi2541997

...American presence fucking up the region, and directly precipitating the rise of terrorism.

Gee it's almost like a twenty year occupation which didn't change a thing and was the cause of tens of thousands of deaths is likely to breed resentment which will spill over back into the lands of the occupying powers? Who could have seen that coming? Apparently not the fucking Americans.

To think that this piece of shit country still imagines it gives a flying hoot about the 'women and children' of Afghanistan:

Everyone on the conference call stopped talking. “It got real quiet,” the official recalled.For the Scan Eagle pilots, their macabre duty now transitioned to watching the bodies of the Afghan civilians, including the dead child as they were loaded on a truck and hauled off. It was common practice for them to watch the bodies, see who showed up to claim them, and where they were taken. “We killed two innocent men and a charger,” the U.S. official wrote in a personal journal that day, using the military jargon “charger,” which means child.

...A military source that worked with Task Force South West told Connecting Vets they felt their drone strikes served little purpose when the Marines had essentially given up on Helmand, feeling that this would be their last deployment before the province, if not the country, was abandoned to the Taliban. At that point, “the drone strikes were punitive. Killing for the sake of killing,” he said. “It’s nihilistic, there is no point,” a second source, one of the drone operators supporting Task Force South West described. “It was clear that we were not making a difference.” For some of those involved in these operations, they saw it as the return of Vietnam War-era body counts used as a metric for success.

...“The only plan was to stack bodies,” an intelligence official working with the Special Operations Task Force said. “Task Force ODIN used metrics of how many targets were hit. There was no real measure for success that intersected with strategic level goals. How does Afghan stabilization intersect with 300 strikes this week? They are not the same thing." Schroden notes that if you are incentivizing body counts as a metric then at some point the veracity of the data being reported by units conducting lethal operations becomes questionable.

https://www.audacy.com/connectingvets/news/inside-america-failed-afghan-drone-campaign-against-taliban

Just as we saw with the war in Yemen, — ssu

A genocide enabled and supported by US arms and money.

Actually countries in the Middle East don't need the US to start wars. — ssu

All the more reason for the US to fuck right off forever.

Also it's very likely that the US will now avoid any international operations. — ssu

Good.

The faster they fuck right off, the better.

This discussion was merged into Coronavirus

If you're entirely ignorant about anything ever, sure.

The profit driven world economic system which puts profits over people at every point.

We call it capitalism.

Oh I do it's just that what you wrote is senseless so I figured that you were practicing typing on a keyboard and was successful.

Bottom line is that any kind of leftism that discounts the importance of states is in agreement with Neoliberalism for all practical purposes.

To create a counter narrative you'd have to provide a genealogy of states that says they also form spontaneously as something essential to some cultural forms. Like the brain of a society, it organizes and protects. — frank

These are also words. Well done.

Ah, preach brother Neolib, preach :cheer:

Edgelord Nietzsche wannabe lol

Those are certainly words.

Call it what you want.

Me, I'd call it a case study in massive failure of healthcare policy.

We also use evidence. Even wankers and tyrants have principles.

But as far as principles go, "whatever the US does, do the opposite" is not a bad one.

One thing's for sure: the American experience shows privatized healthcare is an utter failure that not only entrenches misery and poverty, but costs multiple times more than a public healthcare system. Those arguing the 'costs' angle against public healthcare are empirically wrong.

Mod note: this is going to be used as a vaccine discussion megathread from now on.

This discussion was merged into Anti-vaccination: Is it right?

This discussion was merged into Anti-vaccination: Is it right?

Because the abuse of power by unaccountable multi-billion dollar international monopolies in cahoots with state power without option of recourse is something I am not OK with. It is also something not anyone should be OK with.

The principle at work is to follow the concentration and exercise of arbitrary power and oppose it.

Vox? The Spanish fascists? That's to be expected.